The nuts and bolts of Pinterest

This week’s blog series is on Pinterest as is our weekly webinar (Friday, 2pm Eastern) and yesterday’s post was a bit of an introduction to the social network. Essentially, Pinterest allows you to share and post photos grouped by your interests. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words so here’s what the Today Show has done with this social network to give you an idea of what Pinterest is all about:

So you can see here, the Today Show has a board on Valentines Day, animals, food, sweets and drinks. They have 34 boards in all so these are just the ones at the top of their page. Some are topical in terms of time of year, while others are about things that people like to see and share all year round. Both approaches are great because you get seasonal traffic that picks up around certain holidays and then you get those folks to see your animal pictures so they’ll come back after Valentines Day to share those. Or they will “like” that board so they will see new pins from you when they log into Pinterest.

I may be getting ahead of myself here, though. When you first open Pinterest, whether you have an account or not, you will see a page full of photos, which they call “pins” from other people. If you are not logged-in you will see the pins that are most popular across the network from that day. If you are logged-in, you will see pins from boards that you have liked or that are related to your pins or pins you have shared. The network is smart enough to give you related topics and boards so you will like more boards and interact more. The goal for Pinterest is to get people to share as much as possible so how you add your own pins is not as obvious as how you share pins that are already there.

I did mention this in yesterday’s post but it can’t hurt repeating that when you sign up for Pinterest, you will be able to download a “Pin It” widget which goes on your bookmark menu bar so when you’re searching around on the internet and you see something you like you can pin it directly to a board without even opening Pinterest. That’s one way of pinning but another is by clicking the “Add +” button at the top of the Pinterest site. You can see it in the picture above to the right of the Pinterest logo. So when you pin a photo you have to put it on a board.

And how do you set up a board, you might ask. Actually, its the same basic process as adding a new pin. click the Add + button and select “Create a board.” The process is really pretty straightforward, but one tip I will give you is if this board has a goal of driving traffic to your main website, then you should use your keywords in your board title so people can find that board easily. If you don’t have your keywords or have no idea what I’m talking about, check out my blog post on keyword research. You should also make sure and select a relevant category for your board because that will also help get the right traffic to you boards.

That’s really it, there’s pins and boards. You should be creating boards based on interests or themes and adding pins so people can share them. You also want to be sharing other people’s pins because that’s how you get more traffic to your boards (when you share someone’s pin, they get notified and if they’re smart, they will come check out your board and maybe share some of your pins.) But now I’m getting into tomorrow’s post on sharing and following on Pinterest.